


Lord Have Mercy On My Rough And Rowdy Ways

by Theycallmethanatos



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Doctor/Patient, F/M, Injury Recovery, Mutual Pining, Unresolved Emotional Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 18:18:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7651462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Theycallmethanatos/pseuds/Theycallmethanatos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jesse McCree, the wildest and baddest cowboy of the west, gets nicked in the back of the knee and finds himself in Angela's exam room. And she is not happy about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lord Have Mercy On My Rough And Rowdy Ways

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ashintuku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashintuku/gifts).



It was just a shot. A damned lucky shot from some damned lucky Talon agent. And that damned lucky shot just happened to nick the back of McCree’s leg. The gunslinger’s knees bit dirt as he toppled one leg at a time to the pavement. Maybe he’d sent the agent responsible for his introduction to the asphalt on their way to the grave, but it didn’t change the sting of wind rushing across skin that wasn’t meant to see the light of day.

Ahead, he could hear Reinhard’s voice sweeping over the battlefield. Lena’s timeslip, high and staccato underneath. And beyond, far beyond the encounter, the sound of the breeze pushing through leaves, a bird crying out in surprise at the ruining of their migratory routes. The sun beat down on him, and he grit his teeth.

  
It was a damn shame he’d worn his best shirt to this. Ripping the end of its blue plaid pattern, he took a scrap of it and tied it around the wound. The rusted color of blood already began to seep through and he knew it wouldn’t hold for long. He’d get a scolding for sure later, but that was the best he could have done at the moment.

  
In the end, his best was more than fine. The talon agents hadn’t gotten their hands on the bomb, no one had died, and — maybe even more miraculous — no one had walked away with hurt feelings. He’d joke that scrapping things together in a pinch, biting down and digging deep, that’s how the west was won. But all jokes momentarily fled his mind like a jackrabbit hearing the hounds when he saw Angela’s face.

  
What a sight, he’d thought for a brief moment. A brief, almost intangible moment. Angela’s eyes had fixed him with that blue he could never find the right comparison for (The sky? The sea? Poker chips?). He found the fondness he always looked for in that heavenly countenance, that momentary glimpse of something angelic, and something in his side started to hurt worse than the angry gash in his leg. If only for a moment. Because that heavenly countenance turned into a hell of a panicked face, and that just didn’t make anyone feel good.

“Jesse, what happened?” Angela asked, her eyes already locking on with surgical precision to the blood-covered “bandage”.

  
“Now, now, before you go ‘n’ give me that speech about bein’ careful, ‘n’ watchin’ my tail-”

  
But the glare Angela gave him was enough to assure him that she was both having none of it and expected him to be more careful next time. So he did her the kindness of closing his mouth, but not without a wry, joking grin that usually came paired with the words, “I’ve seen worse.”

  
The second they arrived back in Gibraltar, he found himself on Mercy’s exam table and in a pair of shorts that sported his damage better than his jeans had. Now, didn’t that sound ominous. Sure, he’d been a little reckless out there. Hell, he’d even been a little careless. He hadn’t kept both eyes peeled and got his skin peeled instead. Maybe the thought of it turned the temperature of his stomach down a degree or two, but he’d made peace with it — more or less — when he was knee-deep in Blackwatch.

  
But this wasn’t Blackwatch. This was Overwatch, the shinier and more “official-like” twin. This was a base made out of shiny metals that stayed mostly immaculate outside of that one strange, loping Aussie always covered in soot. This was where people like Angela lived, breathed, and worked, and they had different rules here.

  
When Angela entered the room, her arms full of medical supplies, she was already out of her valkyrie suit. She must have been too busy to change into scrubs because she’d stayed in her black undersuit and just thrown her lab coat over it instead. She hadn’t had to say a word, because Jesse’s eyes were already drawn to her like nothing in the world really ever could compare. Hair up in a loose ponytail that left blonde locks trailing down her neck, coat unironed and slightly rumpled, cheeks puffing out in a brief look of concentration as she dug through the supplies, and she was enrapturingly radiant. A rare glimpse of the sun rising between two mountains, breaking up the cluster of night that hung in the air.

  
“Now, where does it hurt?” It was a joke, but the humor was just beyond their fingertips. Silence swallowed any echo it would have left, and the medical bay seemed far too big.

  
“I dunno, doc, why don’t you tell me?” Jesse managed to catch a more jovial tone, and that seemed to brush off some of the seriousness. Some, anyway.

  
Tsking and shaking her head, the perfect picture of medical disapproval, Angela began examining the opening the bullet had formed. Her shoulders began to fall a little, and Jesse knew that it wasn’t as bad as it felt. Certainly, he knew it wasn’t fatal when he felt a cold breath of relief against the hairs of his leg. “You should be more careful,” he heard. Her thin fingers reached for something in her box of supplies. By the smell of it, he was about to hurt worse than when the damned bullet had got him.

  
“You know me, ma’am, I’m as careful as they come.”

  
Angela looked up at him with raised eyebrows, a skeptical look playing about the corners of her lips. “Jesse, we’ve known each other for how long now? Surely, you can call me Angela.”

  
“Yes, ma’am,” he teased gently, his words not carrying much farther than her ears.

  
Her answer was a damp cloth to the back of his knee and a spiked pain that followed. The antiseptic had arrived. He let out a low hiss as he turned his gaze to focus on the ceiling instead. “I reckon I deserved that.”

  
In her soft, lilting accent, she answered kindly, “I reckon you did.”

  
They fell quiet for a moment, her wiping away the dirt and grime of carelessness, and him slowly drawing his eyes back to the inevitable sight of Angela. When she reached for the bandage, her head ducked down to look and Jesse could see, nestled between the golden strands, a few silver hairs beginning to show. He couldn’t help but lift his hand to touch the back of his head where he knew grey hairs had begun to sprout. Part of him couldn’t even call them the same color. Hers glimmered, his just kept a tally of the number of times he almost met his maker. He figured that might say something about the two of them, and a part of him already knew what that something was.

  
“There,” Angela said. She wiped her hands against her lab coat as she stood, satisfied with the bandaging around Jesse’s knee. A strand of hair pulled free of the ponytail and dangled in front of her blue eyes. With a puff of air, she tried to push it away but it floated stubbornly back to its place. “But Jesse, you really should be more careful. You were lucky it didn’t go through your knee. If it had busted your kneecap…”

  
She trailed off, but Jesse picked up the conversation and the tone, “You’d fix me up just as good, ma’am. I trust my doctor.”

“There are some things that even I cannot fix,” she insisted. “The work that we do is dangerous.”

  
He felt the implication of what she said more than he heard it. The hope it incited settled just beneath his sternum and it told him how she worried. “We can’t all be supersoldiers, techno healers, and smoking Australians,” he teased. “Some of us have to be human, ma’am. Gives a little something extra to the team, don’t you think?”

  
Angela tried not to smile, he could see that in the way the corners of her lips bunched like she was trying to keep it all in, but he saw a flash of those pearly whites even as she shook her head. “Oh, you bring plenty to the team alright. It’s what your absence will bring that concerns me.”

  
“Are you sayin’ you’ll miss my ugly mug?” The line felt risky, and his eyes stayed fixated on her countenance to make sure he hadn’t stepped over the line he was meant to toe instead.

  
If it phased her, she didn’t show it. Instead, having dried her hands, she turned back to him with a brilliant, doctorly smile that he always hoped had a little something extra behind it. “Of course I would miss you.”

  
Her words rang as clinical as her diagnosis. If that something had been there, it didn’t come through — at least not in his mind. But then, softer, now standing in front of him and rubbing her hands together like she couldn’t shake how it felt to touch that space between life and death so often in others, she added, “Jesse...Would you at least consider wearing a little more armor? Just a little bit. It would put my mind at ease.”

  
Her quiet words could only carry so far and silence followed quickly behind it. It wasn’t a harsh silence, not a sterile one like before. This silence was hopeful, tentative, and the pretenses both parties had put up struggled to find room to move in it. He looked over her face. The years had been kind to her. Her skin still looked as soft and as fresh as when she’d first joined Overwatch, when they’d taken that picture, when they’d all been young. Her eyes still looked as sharp as ever, like she was constantly evaluating and re-evaluating the situation because an old diagnosis was an incomplete one. Perhaps, he thought to himself, the only thing that had changed was her smile. It was harder now, more determined. And though absent from her right now, he knew that it was a smile that had been won through force: the smile of someone who had had to keep it up to push through rough times.

  
He’d later claim to himself that he wasn’t thinking when he did it, but he stood up from the exam table — and that put him nearly chest-to-chest with Angela. The space now gone between them, he almost expected her to ghost away like she did in her Valkyrie suit. But she didn’t. Instead, their eyes remained locked. She wouldn’t let him leave without answering her question.

  
“I’ll ask Winston to figure out how to get somethin’ over my legs. How’s that?” His words were joking, but his tone was too heavy to get much wind out of it.

  
Angela’s lips twitched to the side. She wasn’t convinced.

  
“And we’ll go over my chest piece. See if somethin’ can’t be improved on it.”

  
She left out a soft sigh, closing her eyes and finally breaking the contact they’d held for so long. When she finally opened them again, she smiled just a little bit. And that was the smile she’d had to fight so hard for: just the tiniest drawing back of the corners, lips pressed together. It looked so beautiful on her. “Alright. In my professional opinion, that will be a good start.” She tilted her head, eyes squinting in jest. “A start, Mr. Jesse McCree. Do you hear me?”

  
“Whoa now,” the cowboy said, holding his hands up in mock surrender. “Since when have I been a mister to you?”

  
He found an index finger in his face, Angela pursing her lips and shifting weight to one hip as her other hand found purchase there. “Since you started calling me ma’am. How is it that you Americans say? Turnabout is fair play?”

  
Jesse couldn’t help but let out a laugh at that, holding his hands just a little higher. “I could call ya somethin’ else. Doc, angel, Mercy, miss…” _beautiful, darling, dear_ …

  
“Whatever happened to just Angela?” Mercy lowered her finger, swinging her weight to her other hip.

“I could call you Just Angela.” McCree’s grin turned sly.

She caught the jest just fine, her head tilting and lips pursing again. “Jesse McCree, you know exactly what I meant.”

  
“Alright, alright.” He lowered his hands and his voice. “Angela.”

  
The lightness in the air dimmed at that. Even Mercy drew her hands across her stomach in response. Her white-toothed smile turned into that softer one Jesse knew more. “Yes. Angela.”

  
Scooping up his hat and holding it against his chest, he figured the best time to leave was when they were still smiling — so it might as well be now. “Goodbye then,” he said as he begun to leave, but he stopped just enough to say, “Angela.”

  
Mercy raised her hand in a wave, smiling that bitter but better smile. “Goodbye, Jesse.” She lowered her arm as though that was all she’d meant to say before her eyes lit up with her final words. “I better not see you in here again with an injury.”

  
With that, McCree let out a loud laugh as he put his hat on. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Jesse,” she scolded as he ducked out the door.

  
Mercy must have gone back to her work, something important and life-altering no doubt. As for Jesse, he loped towards the firing range where the distant sounds of other Overwatch members could be heard. The way she stead his name still rang in his head, and there was nothing quite like the sound of a bullseye from his peacemaker to work away at that.

**Author's Note:**

> I made an AO3 account just so I could post some fanfic of a rarepair for a dear, dear friend of mine. So there's that. Thank you so much for reading! I haven't written fanfiction in...let's just say it's been a long time.


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